Viewing profile — absherwin

Increasing payouts should bring more players though it would be offset by eliminating the advertising that currently consumes some of that revenue. Flattening jackpots would have a…

If we assume the main problem with lotteries is that they make some people poorer, we need to solve two things: The payout being less than the cost due to both high overhead and tr…

There's a simple answer: Offer a lottery with a high payout rate and flatten jackpots to the extent they don't cause a shift into other worse sorts of gambling. The total amount of…

These criteria are such a low bar that merely stating them upfront would have changed the discussion last week. I wonder if these were the original criteria or if this is a partial…

That’s true for most adjustments. Buffett also suggests investors ignore income statement effects of marking securities to market. “I must first tell you about a new accounting rul…

The most significant adjustment was excluding a $3.2B writedown of the value of their stake in Didi

The key challenge with this system is merchant adoption. Since merchants are forced to charge the same prices in the less valuable currency, they'll drop out if its exchange rate f…

You will find that management consulting firms (and the companies that hire them) have fairly clear rules about how they approach and talk about pricing and competition to avoid th…

Of course the customer can say that. And nowhere does Patrick suggest that taking his advice is a condition of continuing a relationship with Stripe. That's not the issue. The issu…

"every time I convince a Stripe customer to raise their prices ... we benefit directly" sounds like the exact words of an illegal cartel. While I doubt that that is Patrick's inten…

This preprint explores, in part, cross-reactivity for a similar test and found it to negligible: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.17.20037713v...

This is an antibody test which will only be positive days after the onset of symptoms. This is principally useful for several purposes: 1. Figuring out who to isolate in hospitals …

A version of what you suggest has been the law since ERISA was passed in 1974. The problem is what to do if investment performance doesn’t meet expectations, lifespan increases, or…

The report is misleading because AP tends to be used far more on controlled access roads which have fewer crashes per mile. There are other biases too but this alone could easily e…

Unbiased means that if I draw infinitely many random samples from a population and average a statistic (in this case standard deviation) across all the samples, the answer will be …

That's a zero sum game. Let's consider two possibilities that aren't zero sum. Late payments: A credit card company might make slightly more money when people pay late than it cost…

The other bit of evidence she cites but doesn't quantify is that marketing new cards causes incremental debt. That said, I largely agree with your sentiment that the article doesn'…

One bit of additional intuition: Since the square of a number goes up from addition by slightly more than it goes down from subtraction, perturbations increase the average of the s…

Economic growth is the key to resolving the paradox you highlight of his seeming wealth then being inflation adjusted to only modestly high net worth today. Using Maddison's estima…

I agree wholeheartedly with the larger point that we have a higher education bubble. I’m skeptical both that: Lower tuition would make taxing endowments more likely and that univer…

The point you’re raising is that an endowment could simply exist to make money for its own sake. The IRS combats this by requiring a minimum distribution of 2/3 of the endowment’s …

Two thoughts: Funds are explicitly mentioned as acceptable entities in 501(c)(3). For what non-educational purpose are endowments used? While some uses may seem tenuously connected…

The underlying assertion is that universities must provide financial assistance to the majority of their students to be considered tax exempt. No citation is provided. 26 USC 501(c…